For the typical American household, nearly two months pass before a personalized letter sits in the mailbox among the usual catalogs and bills.

When considering the environmental drawback and informational delay linked to snail mail, sentimentality has taken a backseat to practicality. Passing doodled notes in class is riskier than a sneaky text message. Mailing love letters is far slower than a Skype or email to appease distanced relationships. And casual how’s-it-going-letters have been replaced by phone calls and pretty much everything online.

Still, there’s something irreplaceable about the pleasantly surprising handwritten letter. But from 2007 to 2013 alone, there’s been a 21 percent decrease in letter volume.

Imagine Virginia Woolf’s horror today, when in the 1940s she already mourned the decline of letter-writing in her essay, The Humane Art: “News and gossip, the sticks and straws out of which the old letter writer made his nest, have been snatched away. The wireless and the telephone have intervened. The letter writer has nothing now to build with except what is most private.” Nothing seems quite as rousingly secretive as a personalized note sealed in an envelope, federal law even protecting its content from unwarranted eyes. “The letter writer… speaks not to the public at large but to the individual in private,” she wrote—a concept that resonates in the era of mega-phonic tweets and too-revealing status updates.

Statistics, however, show this old-school deed is quickly going out of practice. One in five children in the UK has never received a handwritten letter, and one in ten has never written a letter themselves. And in the US, 150 billion letters are mailed annually, which may seem impressive until it’s compared to the 250 billion emails and 4 billion social-media messages sent daily.

The keyboard is quickly retiring the pen—a trend only solidified when considering the slow extinction of cursive.
But when typed on a screen, our words seem slightly stripped of
character, whether displayed in a quirky font or Times New Roman. Personalized
penmanship, on the other hand, allows more individuality and ownership to seep
through the message. A recent study showed there are also psychological benefits to taking a few minutes a week to write mere “thank you” notes. Two groups, each consisting of roughly 110 undergraduate students, filled out questionnaires concerning their well-being and general happiness. When one group was asked to write three letters of gratitude within a few weeks, they later reported significant improvement in overall satisfaction and happiness, whereas the other group—those who weren’t asked to write letters—returned feeling the same.

Psychological studies and statistics aside: Knowing that time and effort has been put forth in a handwritten letter makes it a memorable keepsake, something we’re more willing to hold on to.

Twenty-five years ago, The Utne Reader made a similar case. “Letters are acts of faith, because in a letter I disclose myself; I open my heart, trusting that the other will read and respond likewise with an open heart,” Robert Epstein wrote in a piece excerpted from East West. “Letters are seeds planted in an open heart that may one day grow into tall trees. And like trees, a sturdy letter can last a lifetime.”

Somehow a tucked-away box filled with letters still seems sturdier and simpler than a hard drive or the web—certainly more intimate.

In our world, the news about the news is often grim. Newspapers are shrinking,folding up, or being cut loose by their parent companies. Layoffs are up and staffsare down. That investigative reporter who covered the state capitol—she’s not there anymore. Newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune have suffered from multiple rounds of layoffs over the years. You know the story and it would be easy enough to imagine that it was the world’s story as well. But despite a long run of journalistic tough times, the loss of advertising dollars, and the challenge of the Internet, there’s been a blossoming of investigative journalism across the globe from Honduras to Myanmar, New Zealand to Indonesia.

Woodward and Bernstein may be a fading memory in this country, but journalists with names largely unknown in the U.S. like Khadija Ismayilova, Rafael Marques, and Gianina Segnina are breaking one blockbuster story after another, exposing corrupt government officials and their crony corporate pals in Azerbaijan, Angola, and Costa Rica. As I travel the world, I’m energized by the journalists I meet who are taking great risks to shine much needed light on shadowy wrongdoing.

And I’m not the only one to notice. “We are in a golden age of investigative journalism,” says Sheila Coronel. And she should know. Now the academic dean at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Coronel was the director of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, whose coverage of the real estate holdings of former President Joseph Estrada—including identical houses built for his mistresses—contributed to his removal from office in 2001.

These are, to take another example, the halcyon days for watchdog journalism in Brazil. Last October, I went to a conference of investigative journalists there organized by the Global Journalism Investigative Network. There were 1,350 attendees. In July, I was back for another conference, this time organized by the Association of Brazilian Investigative Journalists and attended by close to 450 reporters. Thanks in part to Brazil’s Freedom of Information Act and the “open budget” movement that seeks to shed light on the government’s finances (and let people have a say in how their tax dollars are spent), journalists there have been busy exposing widespread corruption in local government as well as a cash-for-votes scheme that resulted in the arrest of nine senior politicians.

Cross-border news networks funded by foundations and philanthropists are carrying out similar investigations all over the world. Based in New York and edited by a Nigerian, Omoyele Sowore, Sahara Reporters uses leaked stories and documents to expose corruption in Africa’s richest country. Its funders include the Omidyar Network, created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pam, and its stated goal is nothing less than “seeking the truth and publishing it without fear or favor.”

A group of students and I studied Sahara Reporters earlier this year. In our report, we described one typical story that outlet broke which detailed how then-Minister of Aviation Stella Oduah purchased two bulletproof BMWs—at nearly double the normal price—with funds from the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA). Sahara Reporters posted receipts of the purchases and documents linking Oduah to the scheme. It also located sources who testified that the whereabouts of the cars were unknown and that they were suspected of being employed for Oduah's private use. Meanwhile, Sahara Reporters exposed the budgetary constraints the NCAA was operating under and linked these to several air mishaps, including two crashes resulting in the deaths of 140 people.

Oduah, who was already under fire for the NCAA’s poor performance, initially denied the accusations. Within days, however, numerous news outlets had picked up the story and run with it. The reports triggered a series of reactions from the government, opposing political parties, civil society organizations, and the Nigerian public. Earlier this year, Oduah was fired.

Honorable Mentions

In recent years, I’ve been a judge for the human rights reporting awards given out by the Overseas Press Club in New York. You should see the staggering pile of entries. It takes days to read through them all. Our major “problem”: an overabundance of top-notch reporting we’re unable to acknowledge with prizes. (Happily, some of them received prizes anyway, just not from us).

Among the remarkable pieces we read but didn’t give the human rights prize to was an Associated Press series on the effects of narco-violence on ordinary people in Honduras. It laid out the way they have been forced to flee their villages or vacate neighborhoods block by block as drug dealers moved in and took over their homes. The series described how some homeowners stopped painting their houses or mowing their lawns lest they appeal to drug lords who might seize them. People were even being shaken down by gangs that left notes demanding payments if they wanted to be allowed to stay in their houses.

At the same time, the government was sowing misery of its own. As part of the series, Alberto Arce wrote about a 15-year-old boy—the son of a college professor—who went out one night to meet a girl he had friended on Facebook only to be killed at a government roadblock by trigger-happy soldiers.

This year, when the press started to cover the flood of children from Central America crossing the U.S. border, I thought back to that series and how well it explained the kinds of desperate conditions that can lead to mass migration.

Similarly unforgettable was the reporting of Cam Simpson at Bloomberg Businessweek about the workers behind Apple’s iPhone 5. Migrants from Nepal, they fell into debt paying middlemen for jobs assembling that smartphone in factories in Malaysia. After Apple started rejecting the phones, production was cut back and some 1,300 workers were left to fend for themselves for months without food or pay. Since their passports had been taken from them, they were unable to leave the country and essentially confined to a hostel, trying to scrape together a bit of rice each day. Finally, in despair, they began rioting and the Malaysian police were called in. Their response will seem odd indeed to anyone reading recent reports from Ferguson, Missouri. Instead of arresting the workers, the police had food delivered and went to work to get the Nepalese sent home. (Still broke, many of them are likely to go further into debt to again pay brokers to secure overseas jobs that may land them in similarly dire straits.)

A third striking piece of global reportage was E. Benjamin Skinner’s “The Fishing Industry’s Cruelest Catch.” It focused on the conditions Indonesian migrant workers encounter fishing in the waters off New Zealand, for New Zealand companies, aboard Korean boats. A report by academic researchers Christina Stringer and Glenn Simmons, in collaboration with deep sea fishing skipper Daren Coulston, prompted Skinner, a journalist specializing in slavery, to spend six months in several different countries checking out their allegations.

The result was a gripping story of modern day slavery. Indigent Indonesian villagers were, he reported, misled into accepting contracts on vessels that ply the Southern Pacific Ocean and Tasman Sea searching for fish to be sold to giant American chains like Safeway, Walmart, and Whole Foods. Many of the Indonesians thought they were signing on to first world labor conditions on modern New Zealand-owned vessels. Once aboard, however, they found themselves virtual prisoners, forced to work long hours for substandard food and beaten or sometimes sexually assaulted when they tried to resist.

After various deductions were taken from their paychecks, the workers, promised $12 an hour, ended up getting only about a dollar an hour. Not only was Skinner’s story well-written and well-reported, but within months of its appearance, New Zealand had moved to change its laws and Safeway, Whole Foods, and Walmart began investigating their supply chains.

The Future of Global Muckraking

When I began researching my new book, Global Muckraking: 100 Years of Investigative Journalism from Around the World, I assumed that the good old days of investigative reporting were in the past. It was a surprise to learn just how much high quality work is still being done around the planet. The amount of data now available online, the ability of journalists to use the Internet to connect to one another and share information—a major aid in cross-border reporting—and a wave of new philanthropy have all helped fuel the current boom. In addition, fresh news operations of every sort seem to be popping up, eager to promote investigative reporting.

I thought I was well versed in innovative 21st century methods of news funding when I headed into this project, but I continue to stumble upon exciting experiments. For example, Morry Schwarz, a book publisher and property developer from Melbourne, Australia, funds weekly, monthly, and quarterly publications devoted to long-form writing on serious issues of the day, while also running the publishing house Black Inc. Australian philanthropist Graeme Wood, with money he made from an online business, founded the Global Mail,a nonprofit website that was similarly aimed at promoting long-form journalism. He also underwrites cross-border investigations via the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. In Brazil, João Moreira Salles, scion of a prominent family enmeshed in the banking sector, has used his money to found a monthly magazine, Piauí, whose recent issue included an investigative piece about indigenous opposition to Belo Monte, a hydroelectric plant under construction in Altamira in the Amazon region.

Moves toward democracy in many countries, along with the Arab Spring (however short-circuited it was) have also unshackled the global press in a variety of ways. Compared to five, 10, or 20 years ago, Myanmar, Ghana, and Tunisia, to take just three examples from many, have far freer—sometimes remarkably freewheeling—media atmospheres. And what’s happening in countries like those has had a knock-on effect on nearby states.

Of course, there are also democratically elected governments in countries like Turkey, Ecuador, and Hungary that have been clamping down on free speech. And from Syria to Ferguson, Missouri, many locales remain dangerous for journalists. On balance, however, the press is ever less under the thumb of government, a situation that only encourages investigative reporting. To take two examples where the press has become at least marginally harder to control thanks to social media, the Internet, and some brave (or nervy) independent-minded journalists, consider China and Vietnam, where once utterly closed media scenes are slowly being pried open.

No one can say how this wave of new reporting will continue to be funded in the future, nor can I promise to be as cheery a decade from now as I am today about investigative journalism’s prospects. Already some donors are putting in place stipulations that might constrain future reporting—like requiring publications to meet benchmarks offering proof of a story’s impact. Still, if the history of investigative reporting in the United States has taught us anything, it’s that outlets come and go, but the legacy of great investigative reporting, the tradition that inspires future generations of crusading journalists, endures.

It can take years for investigative journalism to make a difference and, in the past, many of the most important outlets didn't make money and disappeared. They were sometimes run by passionate crusaders who seized the moment, wrote the stories, and then moved on. Everybody’s Magazine folded long ago, but Upton Sinclair’s takedown of the scandalous Beef Trust, specifically Armour and Co., in 1908 opened American eyes to the way meat was produced in this country. Who remembers In Fact? But George Seldes's prescient 1941 exposé of the dangers of cigarettes in the pages of that now-defunct publication has stood the test of time. And while McClure’s, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, and Ramparts may be increasingly distant memories, the effects of their investigative work ripple all the way to the present.

And this isn’t peculiar to the United States.

Young journalists on their way up are being trained in a craft that, history tells us, will outlast the death of any particular publication. Ory Okolloh of the Omidyar Network regularly makes this point. She notes that after the pioneering Nigerian newspaper Next234 went out of business, its reporters and editors simply moved on to other media outlets in Africa, where they are breaking important stories and training the next generation of reporters.

For investigative reporting, injustice is the gift that just keeps giving. While so much of the business side of journalism remains in flux, fine reporters with an investigative urge are finding ways to shine much needed light into the parts of our global lives that the powerful would rather keep in the shadows. These may be tough times, lean times, difficult times, but don’t be fooled: they’re also boom times. There can be no question that, if you’re a reader with access to the Internet, you’re living in a new golden age of investigative journalism.

Anya Schiffrin is the director of the media and communications specialization at Columbia University’s School of International Affairs. She teaches courses on media innovation and writes on journalism and development as well as the media in Africa. Schiffrin spent 10 years working overseas as a journalist in Europe and Asia and is on the advisory boards of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and of the Revenue Watch Institute. Her most recent book is Global Muckraking: 100 Years of Investigative Reporting from Around the World (New Press 2014). Thanks to Hawley Johnson, Jillian Hausman,and Angela Pimenta for their research for this piece.

The ubiquity of social media and in particular, Twitter, has spawned hashtag activism which possesses both strong drawbacks and merits. On the one hand, online outrage is easy and the impact is iffy (often referred to as ‘slacktivism’). Take the #BringBackOurGirls campaign which focused on the abduction of over 250 girls in Nigeria and gathered over a million tweets, but failed in sustaining interest and ultimately helping any of the girls actually be found.

On the other hand, social media sites provide a space for voices to be heard and are increasingly a source for real-time news and information. The recent killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, illustrates the ways social media can be harnessed to bring awareness and counter mainstream media's stories. In addition to basic hashtags like #Ferguson which spread across the world, three hashtag campaigns have brought increased attention to the situation. The first that emerged was #HandsUpDontShoot which gained a following particularly on college campuses after a Howard University student photographed a large group of students with their hands up and tweeted it out. The hashtag became a protest chant and a number of photos from Ferguson emerged showing protesters with their hands up, often in the face of a highly militarized police force or in the midst of tear gas.

The second in the trend, #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, takes aim at how Brown has been portrayed in the media, in particular critiquing the images of Brown that outlets have chosen to show. It also points out that a single image, used to epitomize someone’s life probably doesn’t tell the whole story of their identity and lifestyle, accomplishments, and failures. Twitter users have responded by posting contrasting photos of themselves. For instance, one tweet shows a girl flipping off the camera right beside a photo of her at graduation followed by the question: Which picture of me would be on the news?

The most recent campaign also calls out the media. #NoAngel was started in response to a New York Times article that profiled Brown, saying that he had used drugs and alcohol, talked back, and that the suburb where he lived had some rough areas. The author remarks that Brown “was no angel.” The Twitter backlash quickly ensued with users tweeting out admissions of what made them #NoAngel, stories like sneaking out at night as a teenager or listening to offensive music. The Times’ public editor has since written a piece saying, “That choice of words was a regrettable mistake.”

The reason this sort of hashtag activism is important is because it represents the creation of an online collective identity and creates awareness and solidarity. It also has the potential to start meaningful conversations, with angles that the media often misses or ignores. Of course to be most effective, the ideas and actions spurred by social media also have to be acted on away from the computer (or phone) screen— and for longer than the hashtag trends on Twitter.

In The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie wrote, “A photograph is a moral decision taken in one eighth of a second.” What is done—or not done—with the photograph after that moment, is also a moral decision. One image that immediately comes to mind when thinking about this quote is the naked girl, running down the middle of a street after a napalm attack during the Vietnam War. The photo, taken by Nick Ut, was published only after Ut’s editors made an exception to the frontal nudity policy that was in place.

As the U.S. engages in airstrikes in Iraq yet again, it’s somewhat astonishing that there aren’t iconic images from the previous forays in the country. One reason is that the media’s focus has been trained on U.S. troops —whether it’s embedding with them during missions or telling their stories once they’ve returned. Another reason is that photos which may be sensitive security-wise have to be screened by military information bureaus before getting the go-ahead to be released.

While in Iraq in 1991 photographer Kenneth Jarecke took a wrenching photo of a burned-out convoy in which there were incinerated corpses, one of which looked like he had been trying to escape from the truck as it burned. In taking the photo, Jarecke remarked, “But if I don’t take pictures like these, people like my mom will think war is what they see in movies. It’s what I came here to do. It’s what I have to do.” While it was approved to be distributed by the military information bureau, no U.S. magazines or newspapers ran it. The decision surprised the photographer who said, “When you have an image that disproves that myth, then you think it’s going to be widely published.” That myth, that the war was made up of “surgical strikes,” making it sound neat and clean, was of course not the whole story. Debate went on at many major publishing outlets like the Associated Press and LIFE, but as the managing editor of TIME told the photo director, “TIME is a family magazine.”

Other powerful images have made it into newspapers and magazines although in different forms. In a 2012 image from Afghanistan, a 12-year old girl, wearing bright green, stands screaming amid bodies following a suicide bombing in Kabul. The photograph was published on the front pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, however each ran different versions with some cropping out the foreground where there was a dead baby.

This past May, discussion arose after photos circulated showing two teenage girls who were gang raped and then hung in India. Some websites chose to blur out the faces of the girls who were cousins. On The New York Times’ mobile app, they showed the photo from the shoulders down. The father and uncle of the girls said he, “didn’t have any problems in people taking the photographs; the problem is the thing that happened with our children.”

As war and atrocities continue to unfold, so does the fine line between what is gratuitous and what is reality. It’s the media’s job to discern where that line holds and to use photos that aren’t violent for the sake of being violent, but to choose the ones that have a story to tell. After all, without Nick Ut’s image, we wouldn’t come to know the rest of the story of the so-called “Napalm Girl”—her name is Kim Phuc and she now lives in Canada with her husband and two children. She has kept in touch with Ut, who drove her to the hospital after taking the photograph and also won a Pulitzer Prize for it. Phuc says, “I can accept the picture as a powerful gift.”

Most of us don't like hearing the words 'climate change' and 'fiction' in the same sentence, but the genre of climate fiction or ‘cli-fi’ is one case where it's okay. As a literary subject, dystopian climate change tales are gaining the attention of publishers and readers alike. Fictional characters serve as commentary on the environmental problems we are facing in reality, as climate change alters our communities and outlook on the future.

The genre distinguishes itself from traditional science fiction in two major ways. First, most sci-fi adventures take place in the far future whereas cli-fi is a reflection of present day and near future situations. Secondly, it acknowledges that disaster scenarios are man-made, a result of human decisions (or indecision).

Authors who have published works that fall into this category include recognizable names such as Michael Crichton, Ian McEwan, and Barbara Kingsolver. Nathaniel Rich penned Odds Against Tomorrow which happened to have been edited during Hurricane Sandy. He says, “I had the very strange experience of editing the final proof of my novel one night, going to sleep, and waking up and essentially seeing it adapted on cable television the next morning.”

Literature’s latitude has allowed the subject to be tackled from a variety of angles. Rich’s novel doesn’t even mention the term ‘climate change.’ Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech commented, “Scientists and other people are trying to get their message across about various aspects of the climate change issue. And it seems like fiction is an untapped way of doing this - a way of smuggling some serious topics into the consciousness.”

The genre seems to be gaining traction. Other authors such as Staci Lloyd and Joshua David Bellin have written books in the cli-fi genre with the young adult market in mind. And there’s even a course at the University of Oregon that focuses on the genre’s emerging impact on popular culture and awareness of climate change.

The Participant Index wants to discover which films inspire people to action.

Have you ever watched a documentary that’s moved you to tears? Or perhaps moved you enough to get involved with a particular issue? Or even change your entire lifestyle? The unique role of documentaries is to inform, entertain and in many cases, urge people to take action.

But what exactly prompts people to do something? Participant Media wants to find out which is why they are developing the Participant Index. Using information gathered from viewership numbers, social media, and online surveys, the company has formulated a ratings system with a scale from one to 100. So far they’ve found that films revolving around the food system and animal rights had the most impact on individual actions while economic inequality was at the opposite end of the spectrum. Additionally viewers were most interested in issues of education, health care, human rights, and crime, but not so into female empowerment or digital intellectual property rights.

In terms of the ratings numbers generated so far, the online series Farmed and Dangerous ranks a 97. The film The Square about the Arab Spring in Egypt comes in at 92. These figures are averages which take into account emotional involvement and action taken, information gathered from the online survey. However one potential challenge will be figuring in how much action can actually be taken. Someone can adjust their eating and consumer habits immediately while helping bring freedom in Egypt is much trickier.

The index will also be applied to some feature films that have a message behind them such as Promised Land which takes on the fracking industry. Chief executive of Participant Media, James G. Berk says, “If this existed, we would not be doing it. We desperately need more and more information, to figure out if what we were doing is actually working.”

It will be interesting to see how the Index is utilized and if it will change what we end up seeing on screen. Hopefully it can assist filmmakers in finding ways to make movies on typically underreported issues more appealing while also inspiring viewers to connect on screen experiences into their own lives.

Wikipedia's standards have never been higher, but the site needs to attract a new generation of editors to survive.

Wikipedia’s launch was kind of an accident. Initially founder Jimmy Wales envisioned an online encyclopedia vetted and edited exclusively by experts—basically a free, online Britannica he called Nupedia. But it was Nupedia’s crowdsourced sister site—designed to let users create entries that experts could later perfect—that took off. It didn’t take long for Wales to dump Nupedia and embrace his radical side-project, which blossomed faster than anyone expected. Today Wikipedia is the sixth most visited website on the internet (ahead of Amazon and Twitter) and its authority online is almost without parallel. Google the Krebs cycle or the French Revolution, and Wikipedia is the first page you see.

But behind Wikipedia’s success lays a tough balancing act, says Tom Simonite at Technology Review, and that balance may now threaten the site’s long term survival. From its beginning in 2001, Wikipedia has struggled to reconcile its conflicting missions, from building an authoritative source for all information on the planet to doing it all through open, anonymous, and decentralized volunteer labor. These contradictions came to a head in 2005 when a volunteer posted a defamatory “bio” accusing journalist John Seigenthaler of involvement in the Kennedy assassination. Big changes followed: editors introduced a system of bureaucratic hoops and automated edits to combat vandalism and raise standards. New edits were now easier to spot and dispute, articles were harder to change, and new computer “bots” roamed the encyclopedia to flag down formatting mistakes and vandalism.

The new policies were effective, says Simonite, and then they were too effective. The changes did much to improve Wikipedia’s quality and image, but they also led to a drop in participation that’s hounded the site ever since. Today, first-time users encounter byzantine editorial guidelines and swift reprimands for mistakes, leading many to simply leave: since 2007, Wikipedia has lost more than a third of its volunteer base. And with fewer newcomers comes less diversity. More than ever before the pool of volunteers is overwhelmingly Western, male, and nerdy, with predictable consequences for the site’s coverage (the ratio of Pokémon profiles to articles on female novelists is revealing, says Simonite).

A larger problem is that the internet’s social landscape has shifted over the past decade, from anonymous, collaborative communities to commercialized, egocentric hubs like Facebook. Wikipedia remains one of the last of the internet’s old-style gatherings and one of the largest. But with Twitter and Facebook dominating our online lives, “people steeped in that model will struggle to understand how and why they should contribute to Wikipedia or any project like it,” Simonite adds.

And while the folks at the Wikimedia Foundation are well aware of these issues, their authority to introduce changes is limited. Wikipedia has always been a community project, and it’s the community that takes the lead in determining and implementing policies (like it did to combat vandalism). If that community is going to survive, it needs to grow.